Democracy in Practice

Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament

S. Rai, R. Johnson, S. Rai, R. Johnson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137361905
• eBook ISBN: 9781137361912
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection makes a compelling case for the importance of studying ceremony and ritual in deepening our understanding of modern democratic parliaments. It reveals through rich case studies that modes of behaviour, the negotiation of political and physical spaces and the creation of specific institutional cultures, underpin democracy in practice

Part I

Performing Representation

Figure PI.1 Nelson Mandela’s statue in Parliament Square, Westminster, London

1

Representing Democracy: Ceremony and Ritual in the Indian Parliament

Shirin M. Rai

Parliaments are evolving and dynamic bodies that seek to make claims to representativeness not only through their institutional form but also through the processes through which particular forms take shape and have affect – through modes of behaviour, negotiating political and physical spaces and creating institution specific cultures which socialise Members in their participation and through examining the performance of ceremony and ritual in institutions. Through these, parliamentary institutions create and maintain powerful symbols of democracy and power. Institutional disciplining is also challenged performatively – by refusal to participate, by subversion of norms or by rejection of rules. In parliaments opening ceremonies, the performance of the Speaker and moments of disruptive behaviour point to how institutional norms are reproduced, maintained and challenged.

Ceremonies and rituals are inextricably linked with these processes. While often ‘invented’ – by the state, political movements or influential individuals – they build traditions as well as become part of our traditions. They draw attention of people to the symbols of authority as they convey a sense of security and belonging among people. Occasions of grandeur, festivities, traditions associated with institutions of authority all underwrite such feelings of belonging but also of exclusions. Such occasions crystallise in the form of ceremonies and rituals and also symbolise landmark events and symbols of authority. These also reinforce the status of our democratic and representative institutions.

Much has been written about the functions of law making, of representation and government policy making associated with the Indian parliament. But Indian citizens also encounter parliament through its ceremonies and rituals, such as the President’s address, debates in parliament and voting on Bills in the House. These become visible through television, newspapers and magazines and increasingly through social media and shape the opinions of citizens about their representatives. So, if these ceremonies and rituals are undermined through disruptions in parliament, the reputation of parliament can suffer. In this chapter, I examine the different parliamentary ceremonies and rituals and assess their importance to the everyday working of the institution and of its Members.

In this chapter, I discuss the importance of ceremony and ritual through analysing aspects of three performances in the Indian parliament by MPs and suggesting that through such a performative lens we are able to disaggregate the various elements of a performance to better understand it and to therefore reflect on its effect within and outside the institution, in its immediate production as well as its lasting impact. The argument here is a political one – that politics is because it is performed. The timeliness of this argument is of course supported by the mediatised world in which politics happens – the 24/7 news channels, the social media that scrutinises and comments on all aspects of political life and political actors, the connectivity that allows for opinions to be widely disseminated to rapidly bring into being an audience that makes judgements about the performance of politics; the ‘now’ of politics is a performative ‘now’ and to overlook this in our analysis of political institutions and of political actors is to be negligent of ‘the political’ itself.

The Indian parliament

Parliament is the institutional space where the performance of representation goes on in symbolic as well as literal ways. In democratic systems, members of parliament not only represent citizens and constituencies, they also in fact somehow claim to collectively mirror the society and nation at large. They not only make laws and hold the executive accountable but also make a ‘representative claim’ (Saward, 2006) – to represent different constituencies, identity groups and interests. But how do they do this – how do they claim to mirror the collectivity of the nation as well as embody representativeness in themselves? This, I suggest, can only be done and understood through the lenses of performance, performing and performativity¹: ‘Performing claims to represent is not a marginal curiosity or epiphenomenal aspect of a more fundamental idea of representation – rather, it creates and reinforces representation itself. Representation is not so much institutionalised as performed’ (Reinelt and Rai, 2014: 21). Issues of identity, representativeness, legitimacy and authenticity are important here. While there is a rich literature in the field of political science on democratic representation and claim-making (Pitkin, 1967; Saward, 2010), very little work has been done on how these representative claims are made and what makes them legitimate. Through this study of ceremony and ritual, I suggest we can fill this gap in democratic theory.

India is a bicameral parliamentary democracy. The more powerful lower house is called the Lok Sabha (People’s Assembly) and has 543 members. The upper house is called the Rajya Sabha (States’ Assembly) with 233 members. Representatives to the Lok Sabha are chosen on a first-past-the-post basis by single-member constituencies for the lower house. Just over 10 per cent of MPs in the Indian parliament are women; the world average is 19.2 per cent, which puts India at 96 out of 186 in the Inter-Parliamentary Union league table for women’s representation in parliaments and 122 in the UNDP Gender Inequality Index (2008). Since 1977, India has seen the dominance of coalition politics. The 9th Schedule of the Indian constitution provides for a quota in parliamentary elections for Dalit (low caste) and Tribal citizens. The voting turnout for Indian elections to parliament remains high – around 60 per cent; voting is not compulsory. This political landscape shapes and is shaped through performance of MPs individually and through the performance of the institution through its ceremony and rituals, its gendered and caste biases, through its re-presentation of interests and affiliation in debates and votes in the legislative chambers and also through the aesthetics, spatial spread and everyday behaviours of all those who work there in interaction with the ‘audience’, ‘visitors’ and citizens who access these spaces.

The Indian democratic institutions, including parliament, show the palimpsest of their colonial history. The Westminster model, that the Indian elites were so familiar with by the time of independence in 1947, became the basis of the new institutional model. However, on achieving of independence, while some ceremonies and rituals of Westminster were adopted and adapted to the Indian ethos, others were not. Those that have continued from the British period include conducting the Speaker on his or her election to the Chair, and those that were done away with include certain sartorial practices such as the wearing of the robe and wig by the Speaker and wearing of robe by the Clerk of the House. In fact, even before Independence, in 1946 when the first Speaker GV Mavalankar was elected as the last President of the Central Legislative Assembly, he refused to wear the wig. Also, instead of a daily prayer at the start of the working day² as in some legislatures such as Westminster, in India a ceremonial playing of the National Anthem at the commencement of first sitting of every session and playing of National Song on the last day of a session just before adjournment of the House sine die was introduced during the Speakership of Shivraj Patil in 1991.³ So, the Indian parliament reflects its history through various ritual markers in its everyday life cycle as well as its ceremonial moments. But how do we understand ceremony and ritual? Below I briefly explain how I use these terms.

Ceremony and ritual⁴

As Kertzer suggests, ‘To understand the political process, then, it is necessary to understand how the symbolic enters into politics, how political actors consciously and unconsciously manipulate symbols, and how this symbolic dimension relates to the material bases of political power’ (1988: 2–3). Ceremony and ritual then allow us to understand political processes, as we the citizen/audience translate the messages sought to be conveyed through these performances. In this sense, ceremony and ritual re-present our political histories, our imaginaries for the future and our construction of selfhood as independent citizens, voter/selectors, democrats, deliberators and law-makers.

There are several ways in which we can analyse ceremony and ritual. First, as I have suggested elsewhere, ceremony and ritual can be distinguished from each other – ‘ceremony means an activity that is infused with ritual significance, performed on a special occasion while ritual means the prescribed order of performing ceremonial acts; we thus distinguish the hyper-visibility of ceremony and routinisation of ritualised performance’ (2010: 288). In parliaments, rules and norms become in/visible through ceremony and ritual – mirroring dominant social relations, on the one hand, and, on the other, almost through a sleight of hand, making them disappear from view. It is this quality perhaps – of combining, as I have argued, ‘hyper-visibility with invisibility’ (Rai, 2010: 287) – that makes it so important to study ceremony and ritual in parliamentary politics. Ceremony can therefore be described as providing the solemnity, formality and grandeur (gravitas) while ritual marks the interactions of the everyday. Despite the differences between ceremony and ritual, however, there are some common features of the two: repetition; acting or performance, which suggests contrivance and not spontaneity, stylisation such that

actions and symbols used are extraordinary themselves, or ordinary ones are invested with special meanings, setting them apart from others; order as a dominant mode, through precise and organised (sometime exaggeratedly so) events; evocative style of staging events to produce a sense of belonging, which might lead to commitment – to the cause; and a collective dimension which has a social meaning.

(Moore and Myerhoff, 1977: 7–8)

Both ceremony and ritual have, as Kertzer has noted, a dramatic character of ritual wherein ‘people participate in … dramas and thus see themselves as playing certain roles [which] … provokes an emotional response’ (1988: 11).

Second, ceremony and ritual can be analysed at both institutional and individual levels. Institutionally, ceremony can be seen as the casting of spectacles through which the formal-juridical power of the state is operationalised through the in/formal technologies of legitimation. As Goffman points out, institutionalised practices discipline individual behaviours; for example they ‘do not so much allow for the expression of natural differences between the sexes as for the production of that difference itself’ (Goffman, 1977: 324). At the individual level rituals are more often seen as the performance of everyday routines, behaviours and activities that reproduce and reinvent power. Goffman (1971: 63) adapted Durkheim’s framework to suggest that in contemporary society, ‘What remains are brief rituals one individual performs for and to another … interpersonal rituals’. However, institutional pressures to conform result in, Goffman argues, ‘situational proprieties’, which include ‘culturally learned practical knowledge’ that allow individuals to ‘fit in’, ‘be good’ and ‘not make a scene’ (Goffman, 1963: 11). We see this everyday as women enter political institutions already dominated by gendered norms that they have to work with if they wish to ‘get on’. For Durkheim, thus rituals were seen as ‘traditionalising’ mechanisms through which societies cohered (2001), while for Goffman, individual interaction is the performative mode of contemporary societies.

Third, ceremony and rituals are embedded in circuits of power – while the habitus (Bourdieu, 1990) of individuals frames their performance of ritual, institutions are also framed by their social histories – relations of class, caste, gender and race can all be traced in and through the performance of ceremony and rituals. That is what makes them an important focus of research and analysis of political institutions such as parliaments. Durkheim saw ritual as a mode of developing belonging or legitimate social cohesiveness. Neo-Durkheimian scholars emphasise that individual identities of citizens find collective shape through witnessing and/or participating in rituals (Shils and Young, 1953).The participation in ritual then defined society, as well as made recognition of those ‘of the society’ possible. However, Stephen Lukes takes issue with the neo-Durkheimians on count of the particular rituals that they analyse – largely integrative rather than oppositional – to make their case. In so doing they overlook how rituals can also be performed to underline the dominance of the political values of the powerful and can therefore exacerbate conflict rather than improve social relations between opposing groups (Lukes, 1975: 300), even while reinforcing solidarity among the dominant groups. Recognition, inclusion and exclusion all take gendered forms, something that Lukes fails to notice, and in so doing reproduce the gendered hierarchies that are ritualistically performed; the quotidian markers of gender-based exclusions are found everywhere – in the spaces women occupy, in the time that they are given to speak in the Chamber, the reception that they get from their peers and how institutional framing suggests particular pla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introducing Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament
• Part I: Performing Representation
• Part II: Deliberation and Disruption
• Part III: Symbolic Spaces
• Index